VDare - John Derbyshire: “The Rectification Of Names”—China Struggles With Its National Question - "Yes, the terminology of ethnicity, nationality, and race is just as flammable in China as it is here. And getting flammabler."

“The Rectification Of Names”—China Struggles With Its National Question

The thorny tangles of identity, ethnicity, nation, and race, are made thornier under a state ideology based on utopian fantasies and the denial of reality.

Sound familiar? It should; it’s what we write about here at VDARE.com.

As a mind-clearing exercise, it helps to occasionally step back from our domestic broils to look at how things are managed, or mismanaged, elsewhere. That opening sentence of mine, for example, applies just as accurately to China as to the U.S.A. How are they coping?

Not well. Consider for example the Chinese higher-education institution whose name is officially translated into English as the Minzu University of China.

The what university? “Minzu” looks like a place-name but it’s not. It’s a Chinese word, translated in Mathews’ Chinese-English Dictionary (1931) as: “race; peoples; tribe; the nation, in the sense of the people.” (Modern online dictionaries concur.) If you postfix -zhuyi, the Chinese for “-ism,” you have the Chinese word meaning “nationalism.”

OK; but if it’s a Chinese word, what’s it doing in the official English name of the place?

Thereby hangs a tale. ...

http://www.vdare.com/articles/the-rectification-of-names-china-struggles-with-its-national-question